WordPress: Smart backups BackWPup and Amazon S3
June 30, 2010
WordPress being as popular as it is, is a very common target for all sorts of evil and dastardly hacks. As such, you should make sure to back it up on a very regular basis. Sometimes we don’t backup because we’re lazy, cheap, or it simply takes too much work. Well, let me tell you about a way to backup your WordPress easily, cheaply, and completely automated: BackWPup. This is a plugin I found that does one thing, and does it well, it runs backups. You can very easily setup BackWPup to backup your all your WordPress files and database to a file on your server. This is a great start, but not the best idea.
Now, for those who aren’t in the “know” the best place to have your backups is “offsite” (or not on the same server or in the same physical location as your original data). This means that after the backup files are created, they need to be pushed somewhere else. BackWPup offers you the ability to FTP said files, but if you don’t have another server…this doesn’t help you much. What BackWPup offers, that is a fantastic feature, is the ability to push to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The basic idea is: “Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.” Most importantly, it is cheap! It is only 15 cents per Gigabyte/Month.